"Sea Monsters" -- antediluvian life forms or creatures evolved over millions of years?

Watching a film at Netflix by National Geographic titled Sea Monsters. (I tried but couldn't get the "embed" function to work for the trailer.)

The film shows some geologists on a fossil hunt in Kansas, finding bones of prehistoric reptilian dinosaurian type sea creatures. They also find the more common ammonite fossil -- and it's interesting to see this as I had no idea what size to picture those creatures, and the fossil is a lot larger than I had visualized, about the diameter of a good sized serving platter I'd say.

It's the ammonite fossils they say tell them when all these creatures in the same vicinity lived, which is of course based on their Geologic Time Table that layers the physical world in time periods, just as Dr. A does as quoted in the post below. They always speak of the time element as fact although it is nothing but an imaginative construct that they impose on the sedimentary and fossil phenomena.

Speaking of it as fact is what I call "word magic." They don't need the actual processes of science to reify an imaginative construct into Reality and enforce it with indignant denunciations as "anti-science" of anyone who isn't convinced. "The poetry of reality" as Dr. A says, although it's just the poetry of fantasy.

Most of the film is animation of the creatures reconstructed from their fossils and shown swimming in the seas that supposedly covered the area for some huge length of time in the "Cretaceous" period, and the "Triassic" and "Jurassic." They do show the sea that bisected the continent of North America at one time, and I have no doubt there is evidence in shorelines that identify such a body of water that stood long enough for such markers to be evident, but of course I don't buy the millions of years explanation for anything.

No, I'm watching this as an interesting imaginative reconstruction of life forms that lived before the Noachian Flood and that were no doubt transported by that Flood to their resting places where they were buried and fossilized and where these geologists now find them.

The "sea" that bisected the continent was of course a temporary stage of the Flood after it had receded or at least begun to recede, as were all the ancient extinct large lakes of western North America such as Missoula and Lahontan and Bonneville. Simply large lakes that stood for some time after the Flood and then finally drained away, in some cases suddenly and catastrophically, probably due to the tectonic forces that occurred after the Flood and also built the Rockies. The catastrophic draining of one such great standing body of water is one very plausible explanation for the carving out of the Grand Canyon. Not a feat any ordinary river could have accomplished.

One funny thing: A few large fossils were found with food in their stomachs, one rather "stuffed to the gills" as it were, which prompted the speculation that it must have died of gluttony. Of another the narrator wondered why it would have died so suddenly after a good meal. Of course they conjured an explanation out of a hat as usual, but duh, folks, obviously the most reasonable explanation is that they were all caught in the same catastrophic event at the same time, some having just filled their stomachs.

Same phenomena, different interpretation, just as reasonable, no, really, more reasonable than the establishment interpretation.

The Flood is Evident Everywhere Pt. 2

Some more from that same EvC thread:

[Dr. A] Genesis 7:19 makes it clear that there were "high mountains" pre-flood; and Genesis 8:7 and 8:13 describe the water as drying up from the fac of the Earth, not flowing away.

First consider the massive evidence indicated in my previous post which is foundational to any answer to these questions.

Either the expression "high mountains" refers to the highest of the pre-Flood hills or to the mountains that were built afterward that the new generations no doubt assumed had always been there. "High mountains" was written a thousand years after the Flood, and most likely no one had witnessed their building, nor been affected by the tectonic forces involved except perhaps as by an earthquake at a great distance. Most of the mountain building went on in parts of the world where Noah's descendants migrated much later.

"Drying up from the earth" describes how it appeared to those at land level, it doesn't purport to describe the mechanisms that took the water away. Some of it no doubt DID flow away, but the upshot was that the land got dry.

As for catastrophic tectonic events, might they not have been a little too catastrophic? I don't see what you're describing happening without tsunamis, which would have been inconvenient for Noah.

Not if he was up on a mountainside in the middle of a land mass rather than near the water.

Myself I don't think creationists need to try to hard to explain the how of the Flood, since your hypothesis involves a god with miraculous powers who can take care of these details. But the question of whether it happened at all is much more awkward.

There is no hint of anything miraculous occurring in the Flood scenario except that God apparently herded all the animals in Noah's direction.

[Percy] As I'm fond of saying, things that actually happen leave evidence behind. If around 4500 years ago water covered the Earth, and if the mountains rose and the valleys deepened, then there must be evidence of these events. Every geological event of Earth's history is accepted by geologists because of evidence, and they'll include the flood as one of those events as soon as evidence of the flood is discovered.

The evidence is everywhere but they interpret it away.

Evidence of the Flood is the worldwide strata chock full of fossils (see previous post), about as evident a mass of evidence as you'll find for any event. Evidence of mountain building is the strata of the mountains themselves and the marine fossils found at mountaintops, at the very least.

[Jonf]...the big problem with condensing events such as plate tectonics into a short time period is that there are certain characteristics of the events that cannot be scaled. E.g., radioactive decay releases heat and radiation, and X amount of radioactive decay releases Y amount of heat and radiation no matter the time period, so accelerated nuclear decay would leave subtle traces such as a molten Earth and all life destroyed twice over.

Similarly, mountain building by plate tectonics is inefficient (thermodynamically speaking) and releases heat, and creates earthquakes and tsunamis. It's difficult if not impossible to quantify the effects of catastrophic plate tectonics but it's pretty certain no life could survive it. And that's not even considering the extreme silliness of the scenarios that have been proposed for catastrophic plate tectonics.

IOW, the fact that we are here is strong evidence that plate tectonics and nuclear decay and other process have taken place over time scales many orders of magnitude greater than YEC time scales.

Whatever occurred did so in a period when there were few human beings on the earth, all of them concentrated in a small piece of geography by comparison with the whole planet. You don't know what happened, you are merely speculating of course, and if you are going to speculate you need first to take into account the MASSIVE evidence of the existence of the strata and their fossil contents, which can only be reasonably accounted for by a worldwide Flood (see previous post) and adjust your speculations accordingly. Obviously, whatever happened did NOT destroy Noah and his descendants.

[Jar says] I have yet to find a YEC that can explain how the lowest exposed material at the Grand Canyon got formed.

I've answered this many times both here and at EvC. The granites and schists were formed by underground volcanic activity toward the end of the strata-building of the Flood, compressed by the weight of the then-two-mile depth of strata above; the Great Unconformity was formed by the force of that same volcanic activity displacing the originally horizontal strata beneath the upper strata -- the upper strata remained more or less horizontal although raised by the force.

The dates for the local post-ice age floods fit within an overall framework, which includes fauna and flora, geology, sedimentation rates, and so on. The whole package fits together nicely, as worked out by scientists over 100+ years.

There are all kinds of absurdities involved in this supposedly neatly fitted scenario, as I note in my previous post. It's all concocted to fit the theory but if you think about the reality it's utterly absurd to suppose slow sedimentation rates, to turn fossils that were clearly catastrophically dumped into their current beds into time-period flora and fauna and so on.

If there were any real dating problems you can bet that various scientists and advanced students would be all over them, trying to figure out where the problems were.

Sounds good but apparently they are mesmerized by the theoretical edifice that has already been built. Their only option would be to turn YEC and if they do that they'll lose all credibility with the establishment.

A good way to become well-known quickly in a field is to find the answer to a long-standing puzzle. But at this point, the dating of the post-ice age floods is pretty well understood, as that site I referred you to shows.

It's pretty well accepted as understood, despite the holes in it as indicated in my previous post.

You note that you find no proof for the worldwide flood in "regular" science and that you get your support from creationist sources. That should be a clue.

Keep checking out the real science sites, and perhaps you will learn a few things. The information is out there, in plain sight.

The dogma is out there in plain sight of course, and the weight of establishment adherence to it can sway a half-educated person in its favor. It is accepted as evidence but it's very shaky evidence in reality. (See previous post and all my others on this subject).

The Flood is evident everywhere, odd they can't see it

Another example of this odd blindness from EvC:

[Coyote]But we do find evidence of localized floods. The channeled scablands of eastern Washington state are a good example.

[Dr. A] Arguably they're not a good example of what creationists should be looking for, since they were caused by a natural dam breaking and a sheet of water sweeping laterally across the landscape.

The question is, what results would Noah's flood have had if it had happened? I think not very much (in geological terms, biogeography is a whole other question).

Such blindness to the obvious is clear evidence that nothing anyone says is going to open their eyes short of an intervention by God.

The entire "geologic column," all the strata, all their fossil contents, is proof of the Flood. The current interpretation is sheer absurdity from many different points of view -- the absurdity of the idea that time periods could be characterized by discrete sediments; the absurdity of the idea that such an abundance of tossed and tumbled bunches of fossilized life forms, often found in beds of one kind alone, could have occurred piece by piece over millions of years, and in such slowly developing circumstances fossilization would be nearly impossible; the absurdity of explaining the worldwide distribution of marine fossils in such extravagant abundance as the result of many former localized changes in sea level; the absurdity of many risings and fallings of land and/or sea level at all; the absurdity of thinking in terms of billions of years for strata in some places a mile deep or more, that are clearly undisturbed by normal weathering and erosion all the way up to the top layers (absurdly considered to be "recent time" as opposed to ancient time), when and only when such disturbances finally occurred -- tectonic distortions, foldings and tiltings, breaking and canyon formation, volcanic distortions, liftings and tiltings, etc. etc.

But a worldwide Food and the tectonic / volcanic disturbances that followed it account quite well for all of it.

How odd they are so completely blind to it, something so obvious.

That's the evidence for the worldwide Flood. The "local floods" such as the one mentioned above that made the Washington scablands are clearly former huge lakes that broke through natural dams -- Lahontan, Missoula, Bonneville -- lakes most likely left after most of the Flood had drained away, dams that most likely broke under the tectonic and volcanic disturbances that followed the Flood, possibly even years afterward.

Yes, I know I'm repeating myself. But then that's all they do over at EvC too. Our positions are pretty well established by now. Either they get their eyes opened or the "debate" just continues along the same old lines indefinitely.

I do hope I have time eventually to get back to Lyell. That got shelved by what is known as "real life" outside the internet.

=========================

Oh, and a side note on another EvC absurdity: Buzsaw got banned from the science forums for the mere infraction of correcting somebody's misunderstanding of his point of view. Simply describing his point of view, which is clearly all that is called for under such circumstances, is insufficient according to EvC administration, which is quite blandly insensitive to context.

Here's Buz explaining his position to Zen Monkey, who had gotten it wrong:

Zen, my position has never been that the rain or flood skewed the dating. It has always been that the implications of the make-up of the pre-flood planet and atmosphere would be the reason for skewing the conclusions reached via research methodology of conventional science.

A perfectly simple direct statement of his position which ZM had misunderstood, and a standard creationist position too.

And here's Admin completely missing the point:

Hi Buz,

It wasn't so long ago that you were restricted from posting in the science forums because of your inability or unwillingness to argue from evidence. You were permitted back in to the science forums after committing to keep your arguments focused on evidence, but you're not doing this. Efforts to reach an understanding with you about what was desired in terms of evidence have not been successful.

...You leave me no choice but to reinstate your restriction from the science forums. Please do not participate in threads in the science forums from this time forward.

Of course Buz is only too familiar with this sort of treatment, as is any creationist who hangs out there very long. I decided there was no point in continuing to subject myself to it, but Buz seems to manage to keep on keeping on despite it all.

The K-T Boundary Fairy Tale

Starting at Post #37 this thread at EvC brings up some familiar debate issues concerning the evolutionist interpretation of the death of the dinosaurs.

The poster of message 37 is a creationist who says:

Its been a great gain for YEC creationism to have the impact thing arive to explain the great fauna/flora change in the world suddenly.
this creationist sees the k-t line as the flood line.
so what did for us is to demonstrate a instant die off and a dramatic and different recovery in a point in history.
We simply say this was the biblical flood.
A great die off and different recovery in fauna/flora.
The impact is simply misunderstood as to when it happened.

The layer designated by geologists as the K-T line or the line between the Cretaceous and the Tertiary time periods this creationist calls the "flood line." This is a popular choice for creationists who locate Noah's Flood not in all the strata but in some particular one.

If a creationist accepts any specific layer of the worldwide strata as the demarcation of the Flood he accepts the evolutionist belief that the strata represent time periods, that the geological column represents the history of the planet. But this is the very position a creationist should be opposing. The geological column is a museum of life forms that lived before the Flood. The strata could not have been formed except in such a cataclysmic event as a worldwide flood.

Evolutionists look at a particular layer of sedimentary rock which contains many dinosaur fossils and call it the Cretaceous period, and a block of layers above it which contains no dinosaur fossils at all, as the Tertiary. Floodists simply see disparate sediments with disparate fossil contents deposited by water in one cataclysmic event.

Here's a typical discussion of the K-T "event" at Wikipedia.

The Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event, which occurred approximately 65.5 million years ago (Ma) at the end of the Maastrichtian, was a large-scale mass extinction of animal and plant species in a geologically short period of time. Widely known as the K–T extinction event, it is associated with a geological signature known as the K–T boundary, usually a thin band of sedimentation found in various parts of the world.

See how they describe something as a fact, a known reality, which is nothing but their own imaginative conjecture? This conjecture is based on a thin layer of iridium-rich clay between the sedimentary rock that usually contains dinosaur fossils and the rock above. They don't even bother to say something like "Scientists have conjectured that the iridium layer might indicate a mass extinction ..." The only clue they have to the possibility of an extinction event in the first place is the fact that dinosaurs don't occur above this line. In other words the whole thing is dictated by their theory that the strata represent time periods.

Non-avian dinosaur fossils are found only below the K–T boundary, indicating that non-avian dinosaurs became extinct during the boundary event.[3]

Yup, it's only the non-presence of dinosaur fossils above this line that leads to the extinction theory -- which, again, is described as a fact.

But the next sentence is also very interesting:

A very small number of dinosaur fossils have been found above the K–T boundary, but they have been explained as reworked, that is, fossils that have been eroded from their original locations then preserved in later sedimentary layers.[4][5][6]

See how easy it is for evolutionists to reinterpret something that doesn't fit their theory. If they found a rabbit fossil in pre-cambrian rock they'd come up with something similar.

Mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs and many species of plants and invertebrates also became extinct.

Meaning they too aren't found in the layer above.

Mammalian clades passed through the boundary with few extinctions, and evolutionary radiation from those Maastrichtian clades occurred well past the boundary. Rates of extinction and radiation varied across different clades of organisms.

All of which is describing only the presence or absence or rarity or abundance of fossils found in either location.

Here's another discussion of theK-T "event" as if it were a known fact:

One of the foremost problems that any successful theory of dinosaur extinction must explain is the fact that not just dinosaurs were affected. In fact, dinosaurs represent but a small portion of the species that became extinct at or near the end of the Cretaceous Period. The extinction event that brought the Cretaceous Period to a close (called the K/T extinction, where K stands for Cretaceous, and T for the Tertiary Era -- the Age of Mammals) was truly a "mass extinction," in that a wide variety of taxonomic groups from many different habitats were wiped out essentially at the same time.

It always helps to take any description of evolutionist fantasy and strip it of all the fantasy accretions down to the bare facts. In this case, ALL THIS MEANS IN TERMS OF ACTUAL KNOWN FACTS is that fossil creatures represented in this particular sedimentary rock that is called the Cretaceous Period do not appear in any rock above it. Their not appearing in any particular layer of sediments means NOTHING. Creatures were simply buried by the Flood in certain sediments and fossilized as the sediments hardened. In the case of dinosaurs, as with all land animals, a pair of them would have been on the ark. They may have survived for a while after the Flood and may have been the source of the various dragon stories across the world, but have since become extinct.

Life in the Ocean
Many of the groups of organisms that were hit hardest by the K/T extinction lived in the ocean. Ammonites and belemnites, shelled cephalopod mollusks related to the octopus and squid, were abundant in the seas of the Cretaceous Period, but had disappeared entirely by its end.

Again, all this means in terms of known fact is that there is an abundance of fossils of these creatures in the sedimentary rock misidentified as the time period "Cretaceous" that don't show up either in the rock above it or in the world today.

Another squid relative, the nautiloids, were also severely affected; only two species, the Chambered Nautilus and the King Nautilus, have survived to the present.

Do they show up in the strata above the Cretaceous or not? This ought to be the subject here, not merely whether they exist now.

Plesiosaurs, long necked, fish-eating marine reptiles, and mosasaurs, ferocious giant sea-going lizards, also vanished from the seas at this time... although their smaller land-dwelling reptilian cousins survived mostly unscathed.

FACT: fossils found in "Cretaceous" rock not found in strata above or living now either, except for the "smaller land-dwelling reptilian cousins."

Some creatures are found in fossilized form in specific layers and not at all in higher layers, but if they live today there's of course no reason to think of them as having gone extinct. But that's an interesting puzzle in itself -- if they exist only in some layers and not higher layers but do exist today, their not existing in layers they must have lived through -- according to the theory that those layers represent huge periods of time -- needs an explanation. But apparently this question only arises in creationists' minds as it calls the whole time period system into doubt; evolutionist geologists seem to be content to recognize fossils in only a specific layer even though none of them may appear in higher layers. Odd but true. Just one of the many ways science is blind to important questions that should falsify their theory.

Of course if the fossils were simply washed into their current beds by the great Flood all this is clearly nothing but fantasy, but worse than that it's fantasy forced on the public as fact, as the whole theory of evolution is


Here is a nicely simplified but typical example of an illustration of the Geological time scale showing the creatures whose fossils are found at each level of the strata, mislabelled of course as time periods.

So what does the layer of iridium suggest? Probably that the asteroid or comet which is supposed to be its source hit during the Flood and spread its iridium over the flood waters, which carried it along with some clay sediments to its current place between the dinosaur-fossil-carrying rocks and the higher mammal-fossil-carrying rocks. Perhaps it occurred in a late stage of the Flood since it is evidenced in the higher layers of the strata. OR, perhaps iridium from the Earth itself, although a rarity, was stirred up by the Flood and carried there. The Flood would have stirred up just about everything on the planet after all.

There is no need for any more proof of the way evolutionism reifies its theory, that is, treats its conjectures and fantasies as actual fact, but it's hard to resist another example:

Dinosaurs are a diverse group of animals that were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for over 160 million years,

"Dominant" because there are so many of them in that one layer of rock that has been fantasized into a 160-million year time period. Sigh

from the late Triassic period (about 230 million years ago) until the end of the Cretaceous (about 65 million years ago).

Translation: Dinosaur fossils are found in great abundance in rocks given these names and misidentified as time periods.

The extinction of most dinosaur species occurred during the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event.

Translation / Fact: Dinosaur fossils don't occur in rock above the iridium layer (except as noted above sometimes they do and that fact is rationalized away but oh well).

The fossil record indicates that birds evolved within theropod dinosaurs during the Jurassic period.

Translation: Bird fossils are found in this rock with the dinosaurs.

Some of them survived the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event, including the ancestors of all modern birds.

Fact: Do they show up in higher rock or not -- it is not said, but since birds exist now perhaps it is simply assumed they also lived during that fictional time period even if perhaps there are no fossils to show it.

Consequently, in modern classification systems, birds are considered a type of dinosaur—the only group of which that has survived to the present day.[1][2]

Sigh.

Allow me to reiterate the absurdity of ascribing a time period to a particular depth of sediment in any case, particularly the neatly horizontal layers of sediments in the worldwide strata. May I point out that while the surface of the earth NOW is quite irregular -- rippled and buckled and carved out and folded and raised up and lumpy and hilly etc etc etc -- the strata are FLAT except where they have been distorted after they were all in place -- originally they were ALL flat. For great distances. All over the world. Where they are buckled and distorted this clearly occurred to many layers at once, obviously after they were all in place and at least somewhat hardened.

Here's a perfectly pedestrian example of the bumpy earth we live on today that also shows the straight horizontal strata that are so laughably supposed to have been laid down in enormously long time periods -- without a bit of bumpiness to show for all that time they hung out on the surface of the planet, just nice clean flat horizontality.

Somewhere in this picture is the K-T boundary by the way. I'm not sure which line is supposed to be that boundary though.

What does this mean? It means at least that logically, according to the geologic timetable, all the earlier periods of time until the recent were undisturbed by normal processes of erosion, earthquakes, tectonic uplift, tectonic buckling, etc. etc. etc. All this occurred to the strata only AFTER THEY WERE ALL IN PLACE. I've put up many pictures on this blog that demonstrate this fact.

Therefore the standard evolutionist / geo timetable theory gives a picture of a remarkably placid planet unlike anything we know in historical time. (Yes I know they are rightly assumed to have been laid down in water, but were they under water ALL that time and only emerged to the surface at the point the canyon was cut?)

So, following the standard theory that explains those neat flat layers as time periods of millions of years each, nothing at all happened in the Grand Canyon - Grand Staircase area in the way of normal surface disturbance for all those millions of years, until after all the strata / time periods were neatly built up. THEN came the volcano beneath that uplifted the land, THEN came the cracking and breaking off of the layers that caused the canyons and the cliffs, THEN came the cataract of water that carved the canyon, and the canyons and cliffs of the Grand Staircase to the north as well. NO canyon was cut until all the strata were in place, no river ran through them until then. For millions upon millions of years.

This simple logical observation OUGHT to wake some up out of the Evolutionist Daydream. It really ought.

The ToE has been Falsified many times over but residents of Wonderland need not notice; and a note about forensics

I keep thinking I'm going to run out of interest in the evolution debate again soon or just run out of topics to keep me going, but EvC is a goldmine of such topics at the moment. Somehow I'd overlooked this thread inviting Potential Falsifications of the Theory of Evolution .

As I've been saying so frequently lately, all Evolution has is Hypotheses, it has no other credentials from the Scientific Method, it's nothing but a subjectively elaborated mental exercise in the end. THEREFORE it cannot be falsified. But by asking for falsification they give the illusion that it is science and that it's those who can't come up with an ironclad falsification who are at fault, not the theory.

Again, this is a competition of hypotheses, it's a matter of judgment calls not science, not any of the methods of science. Creationists have the better hypotheses and the better judgment calls but since it's all a matter of who believes which system this can forever go unnoticed. It's all a matter of who has the power and Old Earth and Evolution have the power.

The geologic timetable is laughable and without it the foundations of evolutionary theory are destroyed but they don't need to notice because there is no way to scientifically prove or disprove any of this. The Flood beautifully and elegantly accounts for all the phenomena that are so awkwardly and ridiculously interpreted by evolutionists as time periods, the disparate layers undisturbed until all were in place, for instance, but this need not be noticed because there is no way to scientifically prove or disprove it one way or the other, It remains observation and hypothesis. It SHOULD falsify evolution just because it's a better explanation, the observation is rational as evolution's is not, and the hypothesis makes sense while evolution's is a weird concoction, but since they are deluded that any of this has anything to do with the Scientific Method they've protected themselves from ever having to recognize it.

The fossil record is beautifully explained by the worldwide Flood, as there is no other way so many living things could have been buried so as to meet the conditions for fossilization, and the immense variety of fossilized life forms, many of which no longer exist, is completely in keeping with the Biblical record of the Flood, but again, since there is no way to scientifically prove this no matter how much more reasonable an explanation it is than the geo timetable /evolution explanation, they can go on blindly in their delusion. Again, this SHOULD falsify evolution just because it's a better explanation, but since they require creationists to meet impossible criteria that they themselves can't even meet, though they think they do, alas, they can sustain their fantasy by aggressive ridicule and flat-out assertion forever.

And then there is the genetic delusion as well, that mutations just keep on a-building the genetic code although the evidence in hand is clearly against this assumption -- and it is, as usual, nothing BUT an assumption, again at best a hypothesis, upheld by belief in it, not evidence. The evidence shows that in small populations genetic deterioration is the norm, but they still believe that in bigger populations mutation saves the day although there is NO evidence for this and simply studying the DNA in ring species would show their assumption to be wrong.

All these things falsify the Theory of Evolution but since the Theory of Evolution is constructed out of pure fantasy like the Emperor's New Clothes, they simply can't see the falsification because their fantasy is so beautiful and so real -- really, so NECESSARY -- to them.

========
Interesting, a contributor to that same thread, named Michael McBride, has said pretty much what I've said above but unfortunately instead of keeping to the particulars of evolution he went way back to the origin of the universe to make his point. It's the same point, which is that the past is not subject to the Scientific Method, so that all evolution can be is a theory / hypothesis (so is Creationism but it's the better hypothesis and we have a written document on our side too). Alas, the poor lock-step pedantic evolutionists aren't going to give him the slightest benefit of the doubt. I suppose, to be fair, that they can't, simply because they ARE locked into their assumptions and their false belief that SCIENCE has anything to do with any of this.

Sorry, Michael McBride. Good try. Start a blog. It's wonderful for exploring the truths that the world rejects.

========
Oh but then a bunch of them jumped on him with all their smug pedantic irrelevant pronouncements about how it's not just that the ToE can't be proven, it's that science itself can't be proven, falsely implying that the ToE is science. Some science IS proven, if not to the unrealizable perfection these pedants keep insisting on, at least proven in a way the ToE can never be proven, because real science is subject to the Scientific Method while the ToE is not, and Newton's law IS an example of real science. The ToE simply IS NOT SCIENCE and IS "just a theory" in a sense Newton's Law is not, but they'll NEVER EVER stop to see how that is true, they'll just go on with their prissy definitional / credal chants on the word "theory" and miss the whole reality.

Anyway, here's another bit of Evo pedantry, or sophistry, that needs to be taken down, by subbie in Post #71:

There is no way to Observe the origin of the universe

There is nothing preventing us from observing the evidence left behind from the origin of the universe and develop scientific theories based on those observations. In the exact same way, there's nothing preventing us from observing the evidence left behind from the history of life on this planet and develop scientific theories based on that evidence.

Right, you can make those observations and you can develop theories / hypotheses about them, both about the origin of the universe and about the history of life on this planet, AND THAT IS THE END OF WHAT YOU CAN DO SCIENTIFICALLY.

You CANNOT TEST THEM because you cannot REPLICATE them, you cannot do EXPERIMENTS to prove or disprove them. The only conclusions and consensus you can achieve are purely a matter of subjective persuasion, politics, NOT SCIENCE. You cannot, in a word, subject them fully to the Scientific Method. You are left ONLY with your theories in the end, and with theory in a sense that Newton's Laws were not, or that Einstein's were not, or any of the rest of the "hard" sciences whose propositions are testable and replicable, because they CAN apply the Scientific Method in full and others can replicate their work.

It's irrelevant that new data might eventually change the scientific picture in those cases, because what is in hand CAN BE SUBJECTED TO THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD and valid conclusions can be drawn to the extent of current knowledge; but THAT CANNOT BE DONE WITH THE PAST, whether with the history of life on the planet or with the origin of the universe and it is sheer delusion that the scientific method applies here as applies to the laws of physics. If you apply what you know about the present to the past you are making an unwarranted leap of pure blind assumption because you have no way of knowing how different the past might have been.

If you'd just PAY ATTENTION to what Creationists have been TRYING to say forever, and really THINK about it instead of just rattling off your nitpicking objections and your canned creeds, you might NOTICE that we are saying something you need to hear.

But I won't hold my breath.

========================
And on a similar point, let's see if we can put to rest another bit of sophistry that keeps coming up in this regard, the idea that criminal forensics is the right scientific model:

Why can't the origin of the Universe be observed?

time travel hasn't been invented yet

Police solve crimes that have no eyewitnesses all the time. Things that have actually happened leave evidence behind.

First it needs to be pointed out when you resort to forensics for your model that you are abandoning classic Scientific Method -- you know, the observation-hypothesis-conclusion-testability-replicability-falsifiability-consensus model. I probably got some of that out of order but you get the idea. Forensics is a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT investigative model. So which is it, Scientific Method or Forensics?

Well, the Scientific Method cannot be applied to questions about the UNWITNESSED past.

So let's see if the Forensics method can be.

You say the crime leaves evidence behind. And so do events in the very distant unwitnessed past. So far so similar. Maybe we're on the way to abandoning the Scientific Method conceit if nothing else.

However, there are huge clues available to criminal forensics that are not available to the study of the distant past because the crime occurred in a present in which other crimes are known. The investigator can't perform tests to be replicated, but he can count on other cases he's studied for clues, hundreds of them. He can remember and usually go back and read about all those in which similar patterns are discernible. There is no such thing for the distant past, there are no anchor points, you are in completely unknown territory.

The criminal investigator can make reasonable guesses amounting to assumptions about the habits and motivations of people who live in his own time and place. This isn't the case for the investigator of the distant past. Even the historically known past can't be approached without a lot of study of history, and then your own experience often has to be set aside in order to understand situations that are radically unfamiliar in your own contexts. Then when you are studying a past that has not been recorded in history at all (except of course in the Bible which you all discount), the origin of species for instance, you have nothing to go on. Nothing. As far as observation is concerned, Natural Selection takes you no further than microevolution, known for millennia, you have only unverifiable/unfalsifiable assumption that makes the leap to macroevolution.

The criminal investigator is most likely familiar with any objects that happen to occur in connection with the crime and if he's not he has sources of information he can go to for help. Even human artifacts from the distant historical past may take lifetimes of study to comprehend and there is no guarantee that they will ever be understood. But even the creatures found in the fossil record are different from what we are familiar with today and we have NO examples of fossilization on such a scale, or sedimentary layering on such a scale, and no matter how much we know about DNA in the present, all extrapolations to the past are pure guesswork since we don't know how different DNA may be now from what it was thousands of years ago. YOu think you have an objective measure in various atomic dating methods but how can you when you can't know anything about how THEY behave in the past either? EVERYTHING you assume about the past is ONLY an assumption and not subject to the methods of science so not falsifiable, and forensics methods can't offer any more reliable information either.

I'm sure I can come up with more differences that make the forensics model just as useless to justifying evolution as the scientific method but I'm getting tired and this should go a long way to making the point as is.

However, I do think creationists do better forensic reasoning about the distant past than evolutionists do. More later.

See fingers of magma beneath the area. Volcanic action AFTER the strata were laid down tilted the unconformity at the base of the canyon beneath all the other strata already in place.

This shows how the layers are described as time periods, limestones, shales, sandstones all characterizing PERIODS OF TIME.